Mu Dynamics: Testing telco services like Web apps

Testing the scalability of Web applications is old hat at this point, with vendors like Mercury (since acquired by HP) or Rational (acquired by IBM) pioneering the approach of placing Web sites/apps under great pressure before they go live to ensure they can thrive under real traffic demands.

Test vendor Mu Dynamics is aiming to help telecom service providers and wireless operators take this same play/record/playback approach to load testing applications like mobile apps or triple-play services. While the approach may be the same, the telco test environment is even more complex than the Web, with more protocols, greater connectivity requirements, and a wider array of services to test and validate.

“We think this is the right approach to testing new, rich, complex services,” said Dave Kresse, CEO of Mu, noting that his company’s Mu Studio Scale solution can be used to test mobile, social, peer-to-peer, cloud and voice-over-IP (VoIP) services, as well as offerings that combine multiple services. “What we can do is turn actual service interactions and transform them into parameterized transactions that can then be scaled and tested. We have a service that can tweet, for example, or log in to a video-on-demand service and order a movie.”

Mu Studio Scale is designed to work with both pre-built test cases of popular protocols and service scenarios, but it can also be used by service providers to create and capture new service patterns that might come along – something Mu calls Active Service Replication (and for which it has a patent pending). That’s an important capability if operators are to keep up with today’s rapid development pace – which of course is the whole goal of the platform to begin with, Kresse said.

“If something new comes out – for instance, like the new Cisco tablet – carriers can very rapidly figure out the type of traffic the device will generate and how that traffic pattern will impact their network,” Kresse said, comparing that to what the industry has seen, for example, testing new long-term evolution apps and networks, a process that can take six months or a year and require the hiring of an entire testing team. “That paradigm is broken,” he said.

Among the common service scenarios that Mu says it can test out of the box: thousands of users making simultaneous calls on Android or iPhone platforms; rolling out a city-wide on-demand video service; supporting thousands of calls in a VoIP call center; or stimulating thousands of users access a cloud-based voice, data or video application.

Leveraging those scenarios, and others that can be created, the Mu Studio Scale platform can be used to identify service bottlenecks, identify security holes and assure the functionality of applications under a high stress load, among other capabilities.

Telecom service providers not only will likely use the test environment to ensure their networks are able to support new applications, but they can use the feedback from those tests to feed into network planning and design efforts to better architect their networks to support future demands, Kresse said.

“We’ve all seen how many [service] issues are hitting on a weekly basis these days," he said. "Mobile operators have a complete lack of ability to anticipate unpredictable demand, so no one has a sense of what a service’s true limits are. We think this can be a game-changer."